Hollow Earth

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This article is about the concept. For other uses, see Hollow Earth (disambiguation).

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A cross-sectional drawing of the planet Earth showing the "Interior World" of Atvatabar, from William R.
Bradshaw's 1892 science-fiction novel The Goddess of Atvatabar

The Hollow Earth was a concept proposing that the planet Earth is entirely hollow or contains a
substantial interior space. Notably suggested by Edmond Halley in the late 17th century, the notion
was tentatively disproven by Pierre Bouguer in 1740, and definitively by Charles Hutton in
his Schiehallion experiment around 1774.
 It was still occasionally defended through the mid 19th century, notably by John Cleves Symmes
Jr. and Jeremiah N. Reynolds, but by this time was part of popular pseudoscience and no longer a
scientifically viable hypothesis.
The concept of a hollow Earth still recurs in folklore and as the premise for subterranean fiction, and
a subgenre of adventure fiction(Journey to the Center of the Earth, At the Earth's Core).

Contents

 1Hypothesis
o 1.117th and 18th centuries
o 1.219th century
o 1.320th century
o 1.4Concave Hollow Earths
 2Contrary evidence
o 2.1Seismic
o 2.2Gravity
o 2.3Direct observation
 3In fiction
 4In popular art
 5See also
 6References
 7Bibliography
 8External links

Hypothesis[edit]
In ancient times, the concept of a subterranean land inside the Earth appeared
in mythology, folklore and legends. The idea of subterranean realms seemed arguable, and became
intertwined with the concept of "places" of origin or afterlife, such as the Greek underworld,
the Nordic Svartálfaheimr, the Christian Hell, and the Jewish Sheol (with details describing inner
Earth in Kabalistic literature, such as the Zohar and Hesed L'Avraham). The idea of a subterranean
realm is also mentioned in Tibetan Buddhist belief.[1][2] According to one story from Tibetan Buddhist
tradition, there is an ancient city called Shamballa which is located inside the Earth.[2]
According to the Ancient Greeks, there were caverns under the surface which were entrances
leading to the underworld, some of which were the caverns at Tainaron in Lakonia,
at Troezen in Argolis, at Ephya in Thesprotia, at Herakleia in Pontos, and
in Ermioni.[3] In Thracian and Dacian legends, it is said that there are caverns occupied by an ancient
god called Zalmoxis.[4] In Mesopotamian religion there is a story of a man who, after traveling through
the darkness of a tunnel in the mountain of "Mashu", entered a subterranean garden.[5]
Chapel, bell tower and penitential beds on Station Island. The bell tower stands on a mound that is the site of a
cave which, according to various myths, is an entrance to a place of purgatory inside the Earth. The cave has
been closed since October 25, 1632.

In Celtic mythology there is a legend of a cave called "Cruachan", also known as "Ireland's gate to
Hell", a mythical and ancient cave from which according to legend strange creatures would emerge
and be seen on the surface of the Earth.[6] There are also stories of medievalknights and saints who
went on pilgrimages to a cave located in Station Island, County Donegal in Ireland, where they made
journeys inside the Earth into a place of purgatory.[7] In County Down, Northern Ireland there is a
myth which says tunnels lead to the land of the subterranean Tuatha Dé Danann, a group of people
who are believed to have introduced Druidism to Ireland, and then went back underground.[8]
In Hindu mythology, the underworld is referred to as Patala. In the Bengali version of the Hindu
epic Ramayana, it has been depicted how Rama and Lakshmana were taken by the king of the
underworld Ahiravan, brother of the demon king Ravana. Later on they were rescued by Hanuman.
The Angami Naga tribes of India claim that their ancestors emerged in ancient times from a
subterranean land inside the Earth.[9]The Taino from Cuba believe their ancestors emerged in
ancient times from two caves in a mountain underground.[10]
Natives of the Trobriand Islands believe that their ancestors had come from a subterranean land
through a cavern hole called "Obukula".[11]Mexican folklore also tells of a cave in a mountain five
miles south of Ojinaga, and that Mexico is possessed by devilish creatures who came from inside
the Earth.[12]
In the middle ages, an ancient German myth held that some mountains located
between Eisenach and Gin Germany hold a portal to the inner Earth. A Russian legend says
the Samoyeds, an ancient Siberian tribe, traveled to a cavern city to live inside the Earth.[13] The
Italian writer Dante describes a hollow earth in his well-known 14th-century work Inferno, in which
the fall of Lucifer from heaven caused an enormous funnel to appear in a previously solid and
spherical earth, as well as an enormous mountain opposite it, "Purgatory".
In Native American mythology, it is said that the ancestors of the Mandan people in ancient times
emerged from a subterranean land through a cave at the north side of the Missouri River.[14] There is
also a tale about a tunnel in the San Carlos Apache Indian Reservation in Arizona near Cedar
Creek which is said to lead inside the Earth to a land inhabited by a mysterious tribe.[15] It is also the
belief of the tribes of the Iroquois that their ancient ancestors emerged from a subterranean world
inside the Earth.[16] The elders of the Hopi peoplebelieve that a Sipapu entrance in the Grand
Canyon exists which leads to the underworld.[17][18]
Brazilian Indians, who live alongside the Parima River in Brazil, claim that their forefathers emerged
in ancient times from an underground land, and that many of their ancestors still remained inside the
Earth. Ancestors of the Inca supposedly came from caves which are located east of Cuzco, Peru.[19]
17th and 18th centuries[edit]
Edmond Halley's hypothesis.

Edmond Halley in 1692[20] put forth the idea of Earth consisting of a hollow shell about 800 km
(500 mi) thick, two inner concentric shells and an innermost core. Atmospheres separate these
shells, and each shell has its own magnetic poles. The spheres rotate at different speeds. Halley
proposed this scheme in order to explain anomalous compass readings. He envisaged
the atmosphere inside as luminous (and possibly inhabited) and speculated that escaping gas
caused the Aurora Borealis.[21]
De Camp and Ley have claimed (in their Lands Beyond) that Leonhard Euler also proposed a
hollow-Earth idea, getting rid of multiple shells and postulating an interior sun 1,000 km (620 mi)
across to provide light to advanced inner-Earth civilizations but they provide no references; indeed,
Euler did not propose a hollow-Earth, but there is a slightly related thought experiment.[22]
De Camp and Ley also claim that Sir John Leslie expanded on Euler's idea, suggesting two central
suns named Pluto and Proserpine (this was unrelated to the planet Pluto, which was discovered and
named a century later). Leslie did propose a hollow Earth in his 1829 Elements of Natural
Philosophy (pp. 449–53), but does not mention interior suns. Jules Verne alludes to the Pluto-
Proserpine theory, which he attributes to "an English captain", in Journey to the Center of the
Earth.[23]
Le Clerc Milfort in 1781 led a journey with hundreds of Creek Indians to a series of caverns near
the Red River above the junction of the Mississippi River. According to Milfort the original Creek
Indian ancestors are believed to have emerged out to the surface of the Earth in ancient times from
the caverns. Milfort also claimed the caverns they saw "could easily contain 15,000 – 20,000
families."[24][25]
19th century[edit]
In 1818, John Cleves Symmes, Jr. suggested that the Earth consisted of a hollow shell about
1,300 km (810 mi) thick, with openings about 2,300 km (1,400 mi) across at both poleswith 4 inner
shells each open at the poles. Symmes became the most famous of the early Hollow Earth
proponents, and Hamilton, Ohio, even has a monument to him and his ideas.[26] He proposed making
an expedition to the North Pole hole, thanks to efforts of one of his followers, James McBride.
Jeremiah Reynolds also delivered lectures on the "Hollow Earth" and argued for an expedition.
Reynolds went on an expedition to Antarctica himself but missed joining the Great U.S. Exploring
Expedition of 1838–1842, even though that venture was a result of his agitation.
Though Symmes himself never wrote a book about his ideas, several authors published works
discussing his ideas. McBride wrote Symmes' Theory of Concentric Spheres in 1826. It appears that
Reynolds has an article that appeared as a separate booklet in 1827: Remarks of Symmes' Theory
Which Appeared in the American Quarterly Review. In 1868, a professor W.F. Lyons published The
Hollow Globe which put forth a Symmes-like Hollow Earth hypothesis, but failed to mention Symmes
himself. Symmes's son Americus then published The Symmes' Theory of Concentric Spheres in
1878 to set the record straight.
William Fairfield Warren, in his book Paradise Found–The Cradle of the Human Race at the North
Pole, (1885) presented his belief that humanity originated on a continent in the Arctic
called Hyperborea. This influenced some early Hollow Earth proponents. According to Marshall
Gardner, both the Eskimo and Mongolian peoples had come from the interior of the Earth through an
entrance at the North pole.[27]
20th century[edit]
NEQUA or The Problem of the Ages, first serialized in a newspaper printed in Topeka, Kansas in
1900 and considered an early feminist utopian novel, mentions John Cleves Symmes' theory as an
explanation for the hollow Earth they sail into.
An early twentieth-century proponent of hollow Earth, William Reed, wrote Phantom of the Poles in
1906. He supported the idea of a hollow Earth, but without interior shells or inner sun.
The spiritualist writer Walburga, Lady Paget in her book Colloquies with an unseen friend (1907) was
an early writer to mention the hollow Earth hypothesis. She claimed that cities exist beneath a
desert, which is where the people of Atlantis moved. She said an entrance to the subterranean
kingdom will be discovered in the 21st century.[28]
Marshall Gardner wrote A Journey to the Earth's Interior in 1913 and published an expanded edition
in 1920. He placed an interior sun in the Earth and built a working model of the Hollow Earth which
he patented (U.S. Patent 1,096,102). Gardner made no mention of Reed, but did criticize Symmes
for his ideas. Around the same time, Vladimir Obruchevwrote a novel titled Plutonia, in which the
Hollow Earth possessed an inner Sun and was inhabited by prehistoric species. The interior was
connected with the surface by an opening in the Arctic.
The explorer Ferdynand Ossendowski wrote a book in 1922 titled Beasts, Men and Gods.
Ossendowski said he was told about a subterranean kingdom that exists inside the Earth. It was
known to Buddhists as Agharti.[29]
George Papashvily in his Anything Can Happen (1940) claimed the discovery in the Caucasus
mountains of a cavern containing human skeletons "with heads as big as bushel baskets" and an
ancient tunnel leading to the centre of the Earth. One man entered the tunnel and never returned.[30]
Novelist Lobsang Rampa in his book The Cave of the Ancients said an underground chamber
system exists beneath the Himalayas of Tibet, filled with ancient machinery, recordsand
treasure.[31] Michael Grumley, a cryptozoologist, has linked Bigfoot and other hominid cryptids to
ancient tunnel systems underground.[32]
According to the ancient astronaut writer Peter Kolosimo a robot was seen entering a subterranean
tunnel below a monastery in Mongolia. Kolosimo also claimed a light was seen from underground in
Azerbaijan.[33] Kolosimo and other ancient astronaut writers such as Robert Charroux linked these
activities to UFOs.
A book by a "Dr. Raymond Bernard" which appeared in 1964, The Hollow Earth, exemplifies the idea
of UFOs coming from inside the earth, and adds the idea that the Ring Nebulaproves the existence
of hollow worlds, as well as speculation on the fate of Atlantis and the origin of flying saucers.[34][35] An
article by Martin Gardner revealed that Walter Siegmeister used the pseudonym "Bernard", but not
until the 1989 publishing of Walter Kafton-Minkel's Subterranean Worlds: 100,000 Years of Dragons,
Dwarfs, the Dead, Lost Races & UFOs from Inside the Earth did the full story of Bernard/Siegmeister
become well known.[36]
The science fiction pulp magazine Amazing Stories promoted one such idea from 1945 to 1949 as
"the Shaver Mystery". The magazine's editor, Ray Palmer, ran a series of stories by Richard Sharpe
Shaver, claiming that a superior pre-historic race had built a honeycomb of caves in the Earth, and
that their degenerate descendants, known as "Dero", live there still, using the fantastic machines
abandoned by the ancient races to torment those of us living on the surface. As one characteristic of
this torment, Shaver described "voices" that purportedly came from no explainable source.
Thousands of readers wrote to affirm that they, too, had heard the fiendish voices from inside the
Earth. The writer David Hatcher Childress authored Lost Continents and the Hollow Earth (1998) in
which he reprinted the stories of Palmer and defended the Hollow Earth idea based on alleged
tunnel systems beneath South America and Central Asia.[37]
Hollow Earth proponents have claimed a number of different locations for the entrances which lead
inside the Earth. Other than the North and South poles, entrances in locations which have been cited
include: Paris in France,[38] Staffordshire in England,[39] Montreal in Canada,[40] Hangchow in
China,[41] and the Amazon Rainforest.[42]
Concave Hollow Earths[edit]

An example of a concave hollow Earth. Humans live on the interior, with the universe in the center

Instead of saying that humans live on the outside surface of a hollow planet—sometimes called a
"convex" Hollow Earth hypothesis—some have claimed humans live on the inside surface of a
hollow spherical world, so that our universe itself lies in that world's interior. This has been called the
"concave" Hollow Earth hypothesis or skycentrism.
Cyrus Teed, a doctor from upstate New York, proposed such a concave Hollow Earth in 1869,
calling his scheme "Cellular Cosmogony".[43] Teed founded a group called the Koreshan Unity based
on this notion, which he called Koreshanity. The main colony survives as a preserved Florida state
historic site, at Estero, Florida, but all of Teed's followers have now died. Teed's followers claimed to
have experimentally verified the concavity of the Earth's curvature, through surveys of the Florida
coastline making use of "rectilineator" equipment. Additionally, the divergence of long plumb lines at
the Tamarack Mine is also claimed as experimental evidence.[44]
Several twentieth-century German writers, including Peter Bender, Johannes Lang, Karl Neupert,
and Fritz Braut, published works advocating the Hollow Earth hypothesis, or Hohlweltlehre. It has
even been reported, although apparently without historical documentation, that Adolf Hitlerwas
influenced by concave Hollow Earth ideas and sent an expedition in an unsuccessful attempt to spy
on the British fleet by pointing infrared cameras up at the sky.[45][46]
The Egyptian mathematician Mostafa Abdelkader wrote several scholarly papers working out a
detailed mapping of the Concave Earth model.[47][48]
In one chapter of his book On the Wild Side (1992), Martin Gardner discusses the Hollow Earth
model articulated by Abdelkader. According to Gardner, this hypothesis posits that light rays travel in
circular paths, and slow as they approach the center of the spherical star-filled cavern. No energy
can reach the center of the cavern, which corresponds to no point a finite distance away from Earth
in the widely accepted scientific cosmology. A drill, Gardner says, would lengthen as it traveled away
from the cavern and eventually pass through the "point at infinity" corresponding to the center of the
Earth in the widely accepted scientific cosmology. Supposedly no experiment can distinguish
between the two cosmologies.
Gardner notes that "most mathematicians believe that an inside-out universe, with properly adjusted
physical laws, is empirically irrefutable". Gardner rejects the concave Hollow Earth hypothesis on the
basis of Occam's razor.[49]
Purportedly verifiable hypotheses of a "Concave Hollow Earth" need to be distinguished from a
thought experiment which defines a coordinate transformation such that the interior of the Earth
becomes "exterior" and the exterior becomes "interior". (For example, in spherical coordinates, let
radius r go to R2/r where R is the Earth's radius.) The transformation entails corresponding changes
to the forms of physical laws. This is not a hypothesis but an illustration of the fact that any
description of the physical world can be equivalently expressed in more than one way.[50]
The Concave or Cell Earth theory attempts to provide a rational basis for not being flung off the earth
while it spins at the currently accepted speed of 1,669.8 km/h[51] held only bythe weakest of the four
fundamental interactions of physics[52] while also explaining the "fictitious" or "pseudo" force that
appears to act on all objects.[53]

Contrary evidence[edit]
Seismic[edit]
The picture of the structure of the Earth that has been arrived at through the study of seismic
waves[54] is quite different from a fully hollow Earth but doesn't disprove the existence of substantial
interior areas. The time it takes for seismic waves to travel through and around the Earth directly
contradicts a fully hollow sphere. The evidence indicates the Earth is mostly filled with solid rock
(mantle and crust), liquid nickel-iron alloy (outer core), and solid nickel-iron (inner core).[55]
Gravity[edit]
Main articles: Schiehallion experiment and Cavendish experiment
Another set of scientific arguments against a Hollow Earth or any hollow planet comes from gravity.
Massive objects tend to clump together gravitationally, creating non-hollow spherical objects such as
stars and planets. The solid sphere is the best way in which to minimize the gravitational potential
energy of a physical object; having hollowness is unfavorable in the energetic sense. In addition,
ordinary matter is not strong enough to support a hollow shape of planetary size against the force of
gravity; a planet-sized hollow shell with the known, observed thickness of the Earth's crust would not
be able to achieve hydrostatic equilibrium with its own mass and would collapse.
Based upon the size of the Earth and the force of gravity on its surface, the average density of the
planet Earth is 5.515 g/cm3, and typical densities of surface rocks are only half that (about
2.75 g/cm3). If any significant portion of the Earth were hollow, the average density would be much
lower than that of surface rocks. The only way for Earth to have the force of gravity that it does is for
much more dense material to make up a large part of the interior. Nickel-iron alloy under the
conditions expected in a non-hollow Earth would have densities ranging from about 10 to 13 g/cm3,
which brings the average density of Earth to its observed value.
Direct observation[edit]
Drilling holes does not provide direct evidence against the hypothesis. The deepest hole drilled to
date is the Kola Superdeep Borehole,[56] with a true vertical drill-depth of more than 7.5 miles (12
kilometers). However, the distance to the center of the Earth is nearly 4,000 miles (6,400
kilometers). Oil wells with longer depths are not vertical wells; the total depths quoted are measured
depth (MD) or equivalently, along-hole depth (AHD) as these wells are deviated to horizontal. Their
true vertical depth (TVD) is typically less than 2.5 miles (4 kilometers).

In fiction[edit]
Main article: Subterranean fiction
The idea of a hollow Earth is a common element of fiction, appearing as early as Ludvig Holberg's
1741 novel Nicolai Klimii iter subterraneum (Niels Klim's Underground Travels), in which Nicolai Klim
falls through a cave while spelunking and spends several years living on a smaller globe both within
and the inside of the outer shell.
Other notable pre-20th century examples include Giacomo Casanova's 1788 Icosaméron, a 5-
volume, 1,800-page story of a brother and sister who fall into the Earth and discover the
subterranean utopia of the Mégamicres, a race of multicolored, hermaphroditic dwarves; Symzonia:
A Voyage of Discovery by a "Captain Adam Seaborn" (1820) which reflected the ideas of John
Cleves Symmes, Jr.; Edgar Allan Poe's 1838 novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of
Nantucket; Jules Verne's 1864 novel Journey to the Center of the Earth,which described a
prehistoric subterranean world; and George Sand's 1864 novel Laura, Voyage dans le Cristal where
unseen and giant crystals could be found in the interior of the Earth.
In William Henry Hudson's 1887 romance, A Crystal Age, the protagonist falls down a hill into
a Utopian, asexual, pastoral paradise; since he falls into this world, it is sometimes classified as a
hollow Earth story; although the hero himself thinks he may have traveled forward in time by
millennia.
The idea was used by Edgar Rice Burroughs, the creator of Tarzan, in the seven-novel "Pellucidar"
series, beginning with At the Earth's Core (1914). Using a mechanical drill, called the Iron Mole, his
heroes David Innes and Professor Abner Perry discover a prehistoric world called Pellucidar, 500
miles below the surface, that is lit by an inner sun. There the two find prehistoric people, dinosaurs,
prehistoric creatures and the Mahar, who evolved from pterosaurs. The series ran for a few books,
ending with Tarzan at the Earth's Core.[57] The 1915 novel Plutonia by Vladimir Obruchev uses the
concept of the Hollow Earth to take the reader through various geological epochs.
In recent decades, the idea has become a staple of the science fiction and adventure genres across
film (Children Who Chase Lost Voices and Kong: Skull Island), television programs (the third and
fourth seasons of Sanctuary), role-playing games (the Hollow World Campaign Set for Dungeons &
Dragons), and video games (Torin's Passage and Gears of War).

In popular art[edit]
In 1975, Japanese artist Tadanori Yokoo used elements of the Aghartha legend, along with
other Eastern subterranean myths, to depict an advanced civilization in his design of the cover art for
jazz musician Miles Davis's live album Agharta.[58] Tadanori said he was partly inspired by his
reading of Raymond W. Bernard's 1969 book The Hollow Earth.[59]

See also